APC and CA team to fully optimise and modernise data centre

APC by Schneider Electric and CA, Inc. have announced a partnership that will provide enterprise customers with a fully integrated solution set for assessing and fully optimising their data centre energy consumption.

High energy costs and contracting budgets are making it increasingly important for companies to operate their data centers more efficiently. Energy costs, now about 10 percent of the average IT budget, could rise to 50 percent in a matter of years unless companies take radical measures.* As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nations servers and data centres is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.** Due to escalating needs, this number is expected to increase. There are multiple efforts underway to reduce costs and conserve energy, but these all rely on the simple fundamental understanding of which systems are generating current demand and where there is capacity available. The combination of APCs devices and CAs ability to aggregate data provides new levels of insight to support this critical market need.

Energy availability and consumption is now a major consideration in ongoing IT operations support, said John Webster, senior analyst with Illuminata, an analyst firm specialising in mission-critical infrastructure. This hardware-agnostic market pairing is exactly the sort of relationship building we need in the IT energy conservation space.

APCs global Professional Services organisation has deep experience in all aspects of data centre energy modernisation. The APC Professional Services team expertly audits existing data centres and advises customers with detailed plans for improvements to the physical infrastructure including power management and cooling solutions. APCs vendor-neutral management software, InfraStruXure Central, includes the ability to monitor devices such as temperature sensors, video, thermal, and other innovative technologies. When combined with APCs Capacity Manager, customers will gain the additional capability to perform predictive simulation of changes to the data center to understand the impact on the power and cooling infrastructure before deployment.

As part of the larger Schneider Electric family, we have a wealth of experience in all areas of data centre and facility infrastructure so it is a natural fit for APC to integrate the energy, power and cooling elements into the CA Enterprise IT Management framework, says John DiPippo, APCs senior vice president of Data Centre Solutions, Services, and Software. APC will not only help our joint customers with the integration of physical layer assets in the data centre, but we can help them to better manage these assets as well. When combined with CAs Infrastructure Management and Data Centre Automation solutions, enterprise customers will have the capability to connect physical layer information to the dependent business processes enabling active energy management across their data centre.

CAs CA eHealth Network Performance Manager (NPM) has been enhanced to manage data centre power equipment, HVAC systems, fuel consumption, and other devices such as the thousands of temperature sensors needed to monitor individual rack temperatures. CA eHealth NPM has a long successful history of managing millions of IT assets worldwide. The product proactively pinpoints service degradations to enable corrective action before they affect users and business processes. When used with APCs InfraStruXure Central, the enhancements to CA eHealth NPM will allow for the capture and integration of data from non-IT devices, providing dramatic improvements in the ability to monitor and manage the energy consumption of these complex systems.

Its a natural extension to enable CA eHealth NPM to manage performance of non-IT devices, particularly those related to energy and power optimisation in the data centre, says Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CAs Infrastructure Management and Data Centre Automation business. We are excited to be incorporating energy management and optimisation into our Infrastructure Management and Data Centre Automation solutions.

CA (NASDAQ: CA) is the worlds leading independent IT management software company. With CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision and expertise, organizations can more effectively govern, manage and secure IT to optimize business performance and sustain competitive advantage.

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